Sparkle Up Your Austere Apartment

March 15, 1986|By Tom Schneider, Special to The Sentinel

Look around the room you're in right now. Do the walls meet the ceiling bluntly, without easements, curves, or moldings? Are the doors flat and unadorned, surrounded by the barest minimum of plain moldings? Are the casement windows framed with aluminum? Then welcome to 1950 and all that comes after.

Your place (and mine), like many in the rental pool today, are testaments to the influence of the Bauhaus and the international style on the past three decades of house-building. Heroes of the modern movement in architecture preached against ornamentation. They stripped their designs of moldings, modulations and textures in the search for purity -- a ''machine aesthetic'' suitable for the industrial age.

What high ideals. And in the few modern masterpieces, what austere beauty. But in less-talented hands, the same style gave us austerity, minus the beauty.

For example, your stripped-down, plain-box apartment. What can you do?

Look at it this way: Great expanses of unadorned surfaces lend importance to the smallest interruption or projection that does occur. The plainest door still has a doorknob. A cabinet has handles. Aluminum windows have locks and crank mechanisms.

''God is in the details,'' said Mies van der Rohe, architect-guru of the modern movement. The details in your place can be raised to a higher plane with minimal work and cost. You can do it gradually, and if you save the old parts, you can restore the originals and reclaim your hardware when you move. Painting the room is likely to precede the detail work. Some of the hardware will need to be removed for painting anyway, and that provides an excellent opporutnity to replace it.

Detailing aluminum windows presents a big challenge. I've tried several ways to neaten the appearance of the edges of aluminum sash, both unpainted ones, and those smeared with paint from walls.

Any finish you try to apply to the aluminum must withstand moisture condensing on the cold metal in winter, and the mold that follows. Extremes of temperature also cause movement between window frame and wall, cracking any finish that spans the joint.

Perhaps the only easily maintainable solution to detailing this area is to strip all paint off the aluminum, clean and brighten with aluminum ''jelly'' cleaner (Duro is one brand -- follow directions carefully) or fine steel wool. Once the aluminum is clean, protect it with tape while you paint, or repaint, the adjacent wall (Illustration 1).

You may find that the gap between window frame and wall has been painted or spackled over so much that the accumulation is hard to remove. The old coatings are probably cracked and crumbly.

This calls for a smooth new fillet of paintable bathtub caulk. When cured, the joint wil be smooth and elastic. Paint over the joint from wall to where the aluminum frame meets the window glass (Illustration 2).

I don't like unfinished aluminum, so I've experimented with ways to paint the crank handles and locks on my aluminum windows. Not much success to report. Moisture accumulates; mold grows easily on the rough surface, and cleaning, without wearing away the paint, is next to impossible.

My recommendation is to detach the hardware from the window, strip off any paint with chemical paint remover, and then clean and polish the castings with aluminum jelly or fine steel wool. Replace hardware using new screws, or the old ones with newly polished heads. In time, we may come to appreciate the look of polished aluminum.

You can make a big change in plain cabinets by installing new, elegant handles and drawer pulls. Measure the hole spacing on existing handles and choose new hardware to fit (Illustration 3). Depending on the cabinet finish, you may or may not have to patch the dents left by the old hardware.

Doorknob replacement is another easy change. You can get new knob and latch sets, on sale, for less than $10. Remove the old set by inserting a nail or small screwdriver blade near the base of one of the knobs. This releases the knob. Now you can pry off the flange that covers the screws holding the knob assembly to the door. Remove these screws. Repeat on the other side, then remove the latch.

Follow directions on the package for installing the new knob and latch set. These modest changes can have a big effect. They'll make your place feel more your own.